This invention relates generally to rotation sensors and particularly to ring laser gyroscope rotation sensors. Still more particularly, this invention relates to apparatus and methods for reducing errors in measurements made with ring laser gyroscopes caused by the tendency of the cour terpropagating beams of ring laser gyroscopes to lock to a common frequency at low rotation rates.
A ring laser gyroscope employs the Sagnac effect to detect rotation. Two counter propagating light beams in a planar closed loop will have transit times that differ in direct proportion to the rotation rate of the loop about an axis perpendicular to the plane of the loop. The planar ring laser gyroscope has the simplest type of optical path. However, other path geometries provide advantages over the planar path.
There are in general two basic techniques for utilizing the Sagnac effect to detect rotations. A first technique is the interferometric approach, which involves measuring the differential phase shift between two counterpropagating beams injected from an external source, typically a laser, into a Sagnac ring. The ring may be defined by mirrors that direct the light beams around the path or by a coil of optical fiber. Beams exiting the path interfere and create a pattern of light and dark lines that is usually called a fringe pattern. Absolute changes in the fringe pattern are indicative of rotation of the ring. The primary difficulty with such devices is that the changes are very small for rotation rates of interest in guidance applications.
A ring laser gyroscope has a sensor axis that passes through the closed path traversed by the counterpropagating beams. For a planar path, the sensor axis is conveniently normal to the path. In an out of plane gyro, the sensor axis may be a line normal to the projection of the path upon a plane. When the ring laser gyroscope is not rotating about its sensor axis, the optical paths for the two counterpropagating beams have identical lengths so that the two beams have identical frequencies. Rotation of the ring laser gyroscope about its sensor axis causes the effective path length for light traveling in the direction of rotation to increase while the effective path length for the wave traveling opposite in direction to the rotation decreases.
The ring laser gyroscope uses the resonant properties of a closed cavity to convert the Sagnac phase difference between the counter propagating beams into a frequency difference. Ring laser gyroscopes may be classified as passive or active, depending upon whether the gain medium is external or internal to the cavity. In the active ring laser gyroscope the cavity defined by the closed optical path becomes an oscillator, and output beams from the two directions interfere to give a beat frequency that is a measure of the rotation rate. The oscillator approach means that the frequency filtering properties of the cavity resonator are narrowed by many orders of magnitude below the passive cavity to give the potential for very precise rotation sensing. To date, the major ring laser gyroscope rotation sensor effort has been put into the active ring laser. Presently all commercially available optical rotation sensors are active ring laser gyroscopes.
When the rotation rate of the ring laser gyroscope is within a certain range, the frequency difference between the beams disappears. This phenomenon is called frequency lock-in, or mode locking, and is a major difficulty with the ring laser gyroscope because at low rotation rates the ring laser gyroscope produces a false indication that the device is not rotating. If the rotation rate of a ring laser gyroscope starts at a value above that where lock-in occurs and is then decreased, the frequency difference between the beams disappears at a certain input rotation rate. This input rotation rate is called the lock-in threshold. The range of rotation rates over which lock-in occurs is generally called the deadband of the ring laser gyroscope.
Lock-in arises from coupling of light between the beams. The coupling results primarily from backscatter off the mirrors that confine the beams to the closed path. Backscatter causes the beam in each direction to include a small component having the frequency of the beam propagating in the other direction. The lock-in effect in a ring laser gyroscope is similar to the coupling that has been long been observed and understood in conventional electronic oscillators.
In addition to causing erroneous rotation rate information to be output from a ring laser gyroscope, lock-in causes standing waves to appear on the mirror surfaces. These standing waves may create a grating of high and low absorption regions, which creates localized losses that increase the coupling and the lock-in. The mirrors may be permanently affected by leaving a ring laser gyroscope operating in a lock-in condition.
Any inability to accurately measure low rotation rates reduces the effectiveness of a ring laser gyroscope in navigational systems. There has been substantial amount of research and development work to reduce or eliminate the effects of lock-in to enhance their effective use in such systems.
There are several known attempts to solve the problems of lock-in. One such approach involves mechanically oscillating the ring laser gyroscope about its sensor axis so that the device is constantly sweeping through the deadband and is never locked therein. This mechanical oscillation of the ring laser gyroscope is usually called dithering. A typical ring laser gyroscope may be dithered at about 400 Hz with an angular displacement of a few arc minutes.
Mechanically dithering the ring laser gyroscope body is accomplished by mounting the ring laser gyroscope frame on a flexure device that includes a plurality of vanes or blades extending from a central portion. Each blade has a pair of piezoelectric elements mounted on opposite sides thereof. Voltages are applied to the piezoelectric elements such that one piezoelectric element on each blade increases in length while the other piezoelectric element decreases in length. The effect of these length changes in the piezoelectric elements is transmitted to the blades through the mounting of the piezoelectric elements thereon. Increasing the length of one side of each blade while shortening the other side causes the blades to flex or bend so that the end of each blade experiences a small rotation about the ring laser gyroscope axis. The voltage is oscillatory so that the blades are constantly vibrating in phase, and the ring laser gyroscope frame mounted to the blades rotates about the axis.
The amplitude of the dithering is generally carefully controlled and monitored to minimize the effects of lock-in. Since the dither oscillation angular velocity and displacement relative to a support structure can be constantly monitored, they may be excluded from the output signal of the ring laser gyroscope. However, it has been found that a constant dithering amplitude is inadequate to eliminate all of the effects of lock-in.
Body dither must be accomplished so that dither oscillations cause the ring laser gyroscope frame to rotate only about the sensing axis. Any small component of rotation about other axes causes the sensing axis to precess in a cone-shaped path about the direction in which it should point. This motion of the axis is called coning. Any change in the direction of the axis due to dithering introduces errors into the output of the ring laser gyroscope. Since a navigation system includes three ring laser gyroscopes mounted in an instrument block with the sensing axes being mutually orthogonal, mechanical coupling of the dither oscillations is likely.
Mirror dither is another approach that has been investigated in attempts to reduce the effects of lock-in. One or more of the mirrors that define the optical path may be oscillated at a very small amplitude. The Doppler effect causes a difference between the frequency of backscattered light and forward reflected light. Transverse dithering of all four mirrors of a rectangular gyro shifts only the frequency of the backscattered beam. However, transverse mirror dither is difficult to implement because of the large amount of energy required to move mirrors that are mounted to the gyro body. Longitudinal mirror dither is easier to implement, but it shifts the frequencies of both the forward and backscattered light. Therefore, the analysis of signals in a longitudinally mirror dithered gyro is complicated.
One approach to reducing lock-in error is to superimpose a random signal upon the amplitude of the dither driving amplifier. However, the superposition of a random signal on the dither driver produces other substantial errors.
Another approach uses a Faraday cell to apply an alternating bias to the gain medium. The driving function for the Faraday cell dithered bias is the voltage applied to the Faraday cell coil. The voltage may change quickly, but the coil current and, hence, the magnetic field change slower than the voltage because of the resistance-inductance time constant of the coil.
It should be noted that when the sign or direction of the dither reverses, the two beams tend to lock-in since at some point the frequency difference therebetween is zero. Since the output angle of the ring laser gyroscope is generally derived from the frequency difference, which locks in to indicate a zero rotation rate even if the actual rotation rate is non-zero, an error accumulates in the output angle. The periods of time when the two beams are locked in are usually very short so that the resulting output angle error is very small for any single sign change. Nevertheless, the error resulting from lock-in during sign reversal of the frequency difference is cumulative, and in time may become significant, particularly in precision navigational systems. This error is sometimes called random walk or random drift.
Still another technique for optical biasing to prevent lock-in is to use a twin ring gyro. The two optical paths are arranged so that they share the same magnetic biasing element. The paths of the beams are not identical, which is a source of error.